Profit Sourcery

By Lauren Carter

Using a Repricer to Boost your Sales

Amazon is a huge marketplace with a huge customer audience, the number of sellers and therefore the number of competitors you have is also constantly growing. When a customer looks at any listing on Amazon they can quickly see all the offered prices for the product and if your price is not competitive it will quickly be disregarded.

With so much competition coming and going you need to stay on top of your listings and pricing to make sure your offer is the most attractive one available. As your inventory grows this is a huge task for one person to undertake. This is why so many Amazon sellers are now using repricing software to automate the process. Repricers monitor the marketplace and adjust your selling price to make sure you stay competitive. If you’re not familiar with repricers it all sounds a little bit scary but in reality it can really make a difference to your sales and is easy to get set up. You just need to make sure you understand how it works and what you need to do to get it working correctly.

When you sign up to a repricer you will be able to sync it with your Amazon account. This will allow you to see all of your listings within the repricing software. You can then set up repricing rules to tell the software how you would like to price your products. We’ve put together some tips to help you work out the best way to price your inventory.

Set minimum and maximum prices

Most, if not all, repricing software solutions will allow you to set minimum and maximum prices for each product you sell so you will never sell for less profit than you want and your products will never be priced way too high. You need to work out the minimum you would be willing to sell each product for and input these for each product. If you don’t do this and a competitor has made the same error you will soon both be offering the product for a penny. This is not good for anyone and it’s a quick way to ruin your business.

Repricers don’t just lower your price, if you are priced too low or all of your competitors go out of stock, the software will raise your price to maximise your profits. You need to set a maximum selling price so that your offer doesn’t end up ridiculously over priced as this will mean you miss out on sales. Setting your minimum and maximum prices is the most time consuming part of using a repricer but it’s the most important thing to do to make sure you don’t end up losing money.

Think about who you want to compete with

If you are selling through FBA then you have a better chance of winning the Buy Box than most merchant fulfilled sellers. This means you can afford to price your stock higher than they can. Competing directly with merchant sellers is unnecessary and will mean you are selling your stock at a lower price than you need to be. If you are selling through FBA then you should be able to set your repricer to solely compete with other FBA sellers, this means it will ignore lower priced merchant offers as they are not a threat to your place in the Buy Box.

Similarly you can often set your repricer to ignore sellers with a feedback score below a certain threshold. If a seller has a poor feedback rating (less than 70%) they will be unable to win the Buy Box so there is no need to compete with them on price. Spend some time thinking about whom it is you need to compete with in the marketplace and make sure your repricer allows you to set these kinds of preferences.

You don’t always need to go lower

If you are an experienced seller with great seller feedback and good customer metrics then your chances of winning the Buy Box are pretty good. You may not know that it is possible to share the Buy Box with other sellers. If you and another seller of a product are in similar standing you can sell at a similar price and both get a share of time in the Buy Box. This price can even be a little higher than your competitor, try setting your repricer to price 1% higher than the Buy Box winner and see if you are able to share the Buy Box. You want to keep the price difference minimal for this to work. Play around with the numbers and see what happens.

For many listings, assuming you are Buy Box eligible, an FBA seller and close enough in price, this tactic should allow you to share the Buy Box and win sales at a higher price. If you price a little lower you might win the Buy Box more often and therefore sell your stock a little faster but your overall profit will be lower. If you find this tactic isn’t working for you then you will need to think about pricing your products to the same price as the Buy Box winner or even lower if that still doesn’t work.

Set different rules for different stock

We’ve discussed a couple of pricing strategies above but the strategy that works will differ for each seller. Try a few different strategies and see which maximises both your sales and your profits. You might find that one strategy works for media products and another works better for non-media. You should be able to set up a range or repricing rules through your repricer and assign these to the relevant products. Use as many different rules as you feel is necessary but the fewer you have the easier it will be for you to manage. Start new listings on the least aggressive strategy and monitor your results. If you are not seeing great sales then try increasingly aggressive strategies until you see the results you are looking for.

Once you’ve set up your repricer and found out which rules work for you, the software takes minimal adjusting to run and can save you huge amounts of time. We’d love to hear about the repricing strategies that work for you. Get in touch on Facebook or Twitter.

Chris Dunne

Interested in trying out a repricing solution? ProfitSourcery readers can enjoy a free 15-day trial on RepricerExpress plus 10% off their first month’s bill when they sign up using the promo code PROFIT10. Learn more at http://www.repricerexpress.com.